I went into the Prince Regent because it was hot out, the sign confused me (why is Joan Baez on it?), and I haven’t been in before.

My bartender was a 20-something hipster American with Guy Fieri hair. The atmosphere was very much that of an upscale American bar trying to show a dive bar side (that it doesn’t possess). The beer was expensive.

Speaking of malignant American entities with funny hair, this was on a wall around the corner:

In a classically dickish Trump Administration move, the US Embassy issued a safety Alert for American citizens (most of whom, it turned out, were in the crowd with me). I think that, despite the generally festive atmosphere this will have resulted in some morons holing up in their hotel rooms to hide from the inevitable violence in this lawless town. If it hasn’t happened yet, cue some fat family on Fox News claiming they had to miss a trip to the wax museum because of the angry crowds 1/2 a mile away. Sad.

We didn’t take a lot of photos and there are plenty of them on the Interwebs already. The one at the top of this article was one I found of our placards. In browsing around, however, I haven’t seen a copy of this one:

Here’s a short video for a sense of scale:

Which also caught the eye of some Twitter wags:

Upon arrival at Trafalgar Square, we realised we could not get close enough to hear any of the speeches so I dunked my hat in the fountain to help cool off and we headed to Gordon’s Wine Bar and got stuck into a conversation with a couple of tables worth of first time protesters. This really was the most civilised of this sort of protest, ever.

After a plate of hors d’oeuves at the lunch break of the mini-conference at the Crick Institute, the need to rinse the pasty nibbles from between one’s teeth was irresistible and a pub was sought out. On the trip to the Rocket — the most obvious choice — Mabel’s appeared one street out-of-the-way and looked a bit quieter. It was. Mind, it was full of suits but my collared shirt served as enough camouflage to blend in.

It is relatively small and dark and, dare I say, classy and the lunch crowd all seemed there for lunch. Perhaps as recently as a year ago the lunch crowd would ingest mostly fluids but the world has gone mad; so much so that Kim Jong-Un commented on it to Donald Trump earlier in the day (and, I hope this, on its own merit, never ceases to sound insane, either).